River of Gods (44 page)

Thirty minutes to train time.

Again, the online booking is locked out. And the card-ticketing
machine have felt-markered Out of Service posters taped over their
slots.

Bloody Bharat.

"Hey, hey there friend, you want to buy ticket right quick?"
The tout is a barely moustached youth in sports fashion, pressing
close, do-a-deal intimate. He spreads a fan of tickets "Safe,
sound. Reservation guaranteed. You look, you find your name on the
bogie, no questions. We have a hack into the Bharat Rail system."
A wave of a beatup palmer.

Come on come on. Yt's not going to make it. Yt's not going to make
it.

"How much?"

Sports boy names a price that any other time, any other situation,
would have made Tal laugh out loud.

"Here, here." Yt presses a fan of rupees at the ticket
tout.

"Hey hey first things first," the boy says, leading Tal
towards the platforms. "What train what train?"

Tal tells him.

"You come with me." He hustles Tal through the crowd around
the chai stall where morning commuters sip their sweet, milky tea
from tiny plastic cups. He slips a ticket blank into the palmer print
slot, enters yts ID, thumbs a few icons. "Done. Bon voyage."
He hands the ticket to Tal, grinning. The grin freezes. The mouth
opens. A tiny ascot of red appears on the neck of his Adidas Tee. The
red spreads into a soft gush. The expression goes from smug
satisfaction to surprise to dead. The boy slumps on to Tal, a cry
goes up from a woman in a purple sari, a cry taken up by the whole
crowd as Tal sees over the shot tout's shoulder the man in the neat
Nehru suit with the silenced black gun in his hand, caught between
getting out after a botched job or taking a clear shot and finishing
it here, now, in front of everyone.

Then out of the crowd comes a moped, twisting this way, that, horn
blaring; a moped, with a girl on it, aiming straight at the gunman
who hears and sees and reacts just that millisecond too late. He
brings the gun around as the moped smashes into him. Screams. The gun
spins out of his hand. The man in black reels across the platform,
slams into the side of the train, slips down between the edge of the
platform and the bogie, under the Kolkata Unlimited, on to the
tracks.

The girl spins her moped round to face Tal as the crowd rushes to the
train to see what has become of the gunman. "Get on!" she
cries in English. A hand appears from underneath the bogie. Arms
reach down to help it up. "If you want to live, get on the
bike!"

Any other option would be a greater insanity. The girl swings Tal
around, yt slips on close and clinging behind her. She twists the
throttle, tears away through the platform crowd, horn buzzing
furiously. She runs off the end of the platform, steers the bouncing
moped over the tracks and sleepers, cuts in front of a slow moving
local, speeds along the litter-strewn verge, hooting at the
pedestrians who use it as a commuter run.

"I should introduce myself," the girl throws back over her
shoulder. "You don't know me, but I sort of feel I owe you."

"What?" shouts Tal, cheek pressed against her back. "My
name's Najia Askarzadah. I got you into all this."

By eleven o'clock repeated police lathi charges have cleared the
streets. Policemen chase individual karsevaks through the galis but
they are just the rude boys, trouble boys who are always there for
anything on their terrain. The alleys are too narrow for the fire
engines so the brigade reels hoses along the streets, bolting them
together into longer runs. Water sprays from the seams. Kashi
residents peer enviously from their verandas and open storefronts. It
is all too late. It is over. The old wooden haveli has fallen in on
itself in a pile of glowing, clinking coals. All the firefighters can
do is tamp it down and prevent it spreading to neighbouring
buildings. They slip and fall on a slick of banana skins.

The attack was thorough and effective. Amazing, the speed with which
it caught and held. Dry as tinder. This drought, this long drought.
Stretcher parties draw away the dead. Varanasi, city of burnings. The
ones who fled out the front ran into the full wrath of the Shivaji.
The bodies are strewn up the alley. One wears a car tire around its
neck, burned down to the steel wires. The body is intact, the head a
charred skull. One has been run through with a Siva trident. One has
been disembowelled and the gape filled with burning plastic trash.
The police stamp out the flames and drag the thing away, trying to
handle it as little as possible. They fear the polluting touch of the
hijra, the un-sex.

Hovercams and handhelds come in for close-ups, back in the livefeed
studio the news editors read the footage and decide what stance to
take: outraged liberal opinion or popular wrath at the hypocrisy of
the Rana government. N. K. Jivanjee will issue a statement at eleven
thirty. Newsroom editors love a story on the up-ramp. The cricket
pulled out before the climax, the war has provided nothing but hours
of armoured personnel carriers driving up and down the long curve of
the Kunda Khadar dam; but this Rana sex scandal is spiralling out of
control into charred bodies and street fighting. One shot in
particular makes it on to all the morning bulletins; the poor blind
lady, caught up by the rage with the side of her head smashed in by a
club. No one can work out why she has a banana in her hand.

Beyond the dripping fringe of coconut thatch, the rain reduces the
world to flux. Palms, church, the stalls along the road, the road
itself and the vehicles that pass up and down it are shades of grey,
washed out, liquid, running into each other like a Japanese ink
painting. The truck headlights are wan and watery. Earth, river, and
sky are a continuity.

In her shapeless plastic cape, Lisa Durnau can't even see the end of
the gangplank. In the next cabin Dr. Ghotse crouches over the gas
burner with a promise of chai and cheer. Lisa Durnau can leave the
chai. She's tried to get them to make it just with water and nix the
sugar but it comes sweet and milky anyway. Iced would be ecstasy.
Beneath her stifling rainsheet sweat clings to her. The rain cascades
from eaves.

It was raining when she touched down at Thiruvananthapuram. A boy
with an umbrella escorted her across the streaming apron to arrivals.
Coach-class Westerners clashed and cursed, jackets and newspapers
held over their heads. The Indians just got wet and looked happy.
Lisa Durnau has seen many types of rain; the steely grey rain of
north eastern springs; the penetrating drizzle that blows for days on
end up in the northwest; the terrifying cloudbursts of the plains
states that are like a waterfall opening in the sky, mothers of
flash-floods and sheet erosion. Happy rain was new to her. The cab to
the hotel had driven axle-deep through streets awash with floodwater
and floating trash. The cows stood mired to the hock. Cycle rickshaws
ploughed through the dancing brown liquid, throwing up beery wakes.
She watched a rat swim across the taxi's path, brave head held high.
Today as she dodged between the puddles to the gangplank she had seen
a little girl swimming up the backwater, pushing a slim raft no more
than three bamboo poles lashed together, a battered metal pot
balanced on it. The girl's hair was plastered to her skull like some
sleek aquatic mammal but her face was radiant.

The CIA briefing had neglected to tell her it was the monsoon in
Kerala.

Lisa Durnau does not like being a government spook. No sooner had the
lightbody touched down on a pyre of plasma than the lessons began.
She had her first briefing in the bus to the medical centre, still
weak and achey from welcoming back gravity. She had not even had time
to change before they lifted her and threw her on the flight up to
New York. At Kennedy she was briefed on embassy liaisons and security
passwords in the limo to the vip suite. There a man and a woman in
suits lectured her on the correct use of the location device inside
one of the business centre mute fields. At the gate they presented
her with a small valise of suitable clothing in her size. Then they
shook hands gravely and wished her a pleasant trip and a successful
mission. Lisa opened the case as the taxi drew up at the hotel. As
she had feared. The sleeves on the T-shirts were all wrong and the
underwear was simply unspeakable. Folded at the bottom were two
elegant black suits. She half expected Daley Suarez-Martin to climb
out of the minibar. The next day Lisa took her bottomless black
credit card out to the bazaar and refilled the case for less than the
price of a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch panties. Including
wet-weather wear.

"Yes, it is a marvellous thing to see," Dr. Ghotse says.
Lisa Durnau starts. She has let herself become hypnotised by the
fingers of rain on the thatch. He stands with a cup of chai in either
hand. It is as she feared but it indeed cheers her. The boat smells
damp and neglected. She does not like to think of Thomas Lull ending
up here. She cannot imagine it under any other climate than this
endless white rain. She had read the Tantric symbols on the roof
mats, noted the name in white on the prow:
Salve Vagina
. No
doubt that Thomas Lull had been here. But she had been scared at what
she would find: Lull's things; Lull's life beyond her, beyond
Alterre; Lull's new world. Now that she has seen how little there is,
how poor and spare the three thatched cabins are, apprehension turns
to melancholy. It is like he has died.

Dr. Ghotse bids her sit on one of the upholstered divans that run the
length of the cabin. Lisa Durnau struggles out of her plastic sheet,
leaves it dripping on the soft fibre matting. The chai is good,
sensual.

"Why, up in the black north they have gone to war over it. They
are uncivilised people. Most caste ridden. Now, Miss Durnau; what is
it you require from my good friend Thomas Lull?"

Lisa Durnau realises there are two ways she can play this and every
other similar scene. She can assume Lull has told his good friend Dr.
Ghotse about what he left behind, and who. She can take the line of
her intelligence briefings and assume no one knows or can know
anything.

You're in India now, LD.

A chip of Schubert piano sonatas has worked its way down the side of
the cushion.

"I've been commissioned by my government to find Lull and pass
information to him. If possible, I'm to persuade him to return to the
United States with me."

"What is this information you are asking?"

"I'm technically not at liberty to disclose that, Dr. Ghotse.
Sufficient to say that it's of a scientific nature and requires
Lull's unique insight to interpret."

"Lull. Is that what you called him?"

"Did he tell you about me?"

"Enough for me to be surprised that you are about your
government's business."

Look after it right. Stop them sticking fucking Coke banners on
the clouds
, he had charged her. The memory of Lull that night in
the Oxford student bar is more fresh, more vital than this house he
vacated so recently. She cannot feel him here, beneath this canopy of
rain-sound. She imagines running through that rain, pushing like an
otter through the blood-warm backwater like the little raft girl with
her pewter pot. What have they asked you to become?

Lisa Durnau takes out the datablock and thumbs it open. Dr. Ghotse
sits with his legs crossed at the ankles, his chai cup set on the low
carved coffee table.

"You're right. This is the truth. You may not believe it, but as
far as I know, it is true." She calls up the Tabernacle image of
Lull.

"That is Professor Lull," Dr. Ghotse says. "It is not
a very good photograph. Excessively grainy."

"That's because that photograph was generated by an
extraterrestrial artefact discovered by NASA inside an asteroid
called Darnley 285. This artefact is known as the Tabernacle."

"Ah, tabernacle, the sanctuary of the Ark of the Covenant of the
Hebrews."

"I'm not quite sure you heard what I said. The Tabernacle is a
non-human artefact. It's the product of an extraterrestrial
intelligence."

"I heard you correctly, Miss Durnau."

"You're not surprised?"

"The universe is a very great place. The surprise would be if it
were not so." Lisa sets the block down on the table between the
chai cups.

"There's something else I need you to understand. This asteroid
Darnley 285 is extremely old.

It's older than the age of our solar system. Can you understand
that?"

"Miss Durnau, I am educated in both Western and Hindu
cosmologies. It is indeed a wonder that an object has survived the
destruction at the end of the Dwapara Yuga; perhaps even ages before
that. This Tabernacle might be a remnant of the Age of Truth itself."

"The reason I want to find Thomas Lull, what I want to ask him
is: why is his face inside a rock seven billion years old?"

"That would be a question," Dr. Ghotse agrees.

The rain has found its way through the coconut thatch. A small but
swelling drip gathers and bursts on the low table carved with
entwined Tantric lovers. Monsoon above Lisa Durnau, below her, behind
her, before her, dissolving the certainties of Kennedy, of New York,
of the hypersonic transport. This rain, this India.

The roar, the rain, the smell of sewage and spice and rot, the
ceaseless chaos of the traffic, the burst dog half gone to black
bones in the streaming gutter, the circling carrion-eyed kites, the
peeling mould-stained buildings, the sweet stench of sugar-cane
alcofuel and burning ghee from the puri vendors, the children
pressing in around her, clean and fed but asking for rupee rupee, a
pen a pen, the hawkers and vendors and fortune tellers and massage
artists homing in on a white woman in the rain: the people. The
people. Within a hundred metres of her hotel, Kerala felled her. The
sounds, the smells, the sights and sensations combined into a massive
attack on her sensibilities. L. Durnau the preacherman's daughter.
This was Thomas Lull's world. She must meet it on Thomas Lull's
terms.